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He was inspired to write Outlier by reading countless stories about chief executives earning multimillion-dollar salaries. “I just got annoyed,” he says on the phone from his apartment in downtown New York, “at the self-righteousness of their justification of why they deserved that much money. I don’t feel I deserve the money I make, and I don’t make $300 million a year!”

Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their succes is not exceptional of mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky — but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.